Xiaomi against imaginary valuations

Investors are taking a second look at China’s high-value startups such as smartphone maker Xiaomi, which is now facing growing pressure to live up to high expectations.

Xiaomi missed its 2015 sales target: they estimated 80 million smartphones shipped, but they weren’t capable of growing that fast and that much. They haven’t surprised us as before, and now the pressure from investors seems to be pretty high.

That’s reasonable, and maybe Xiaomi’s valuation was overestimated. But its business is done in quite the right way -let’s forget the design similarities with Apple-, so we should take that into account.

I can’t help but compare this company with Uber or Airbnb, which certainly offer us really good alternatives on their segments, but at the cost of companies that work according to the current regulation. Until that regulation covers that kind of ‘sharing economy‘ (great euphemism), they are doing something that could be (or has been) considered a fraud in many countries.

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish.
The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.